Under Armour Is Replacing Nike in This Big University Deal

Under Armour has signed a decade-long partnership with the University of California Berkeley to outfit all of the school’s sports programs beginning this summer in a reportedly costly deal that will replace Nike.

The deal with Under Armour will officially kick off on July 1 in a partnership that Under Armour ua says is the first to feature a “comprehensive, campus-wide relationship.” That means Under Armour will not only exclusively design and supply the footwear, apparel and equipment for the university’s student athletes, it will also provide student internship opportunities to UC Berkeley graduates and product discounts.

Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank said his company was looking forward to collaborating with the athletic teams and the entire campus for “betterment in fitness, wellness, charitable and professional development in ways never done before by an apparel and footwear partner.”

Under Armour has increasingly made a bigger bet on sponsorships with individual pro athletes and school programs to help boost the brand’s allure in a market that has long been dominated by Nike nke. The Baltimore-based athletic gear maker first entered the collegiate market with a 2006 deal with Auburn University. The pact with Cal, the brand’s 34th Division 1 all-school partnership, furthers that footprint.

Those sponsorship deals have helped Under Armour report strong sales growth that has outpaced Nike, although the latter remains far larger and is also reporting consistent sales gains. And some analysts have warned that sponsorship deals will become more pricey as Nike, Under Armour and Germany’s Adidas all compete for individual and team pacts.

ESPN’s Darren Rovell, citing sources, reported that the annual cash Cal received for the Nike deal was $150,000. The new Under Armour deal: $3.5 million. Rovell reports the deal is worth nearly $86 million in cash and product.

Under Armour touted the Cal pact because it also includes a commitment to create fitness and nutrition challenges for Cal students, faculty, and alumni. The company will also offer discounts for Under Armour’s connected fitness system, called UA HealthBox. All of that implies Under Armour is taking its role as a broader health and fitness brand more seriously, a talking point Plank often touts when speaking to the media and Wall Street analysts.

Here’s How The NCAA Hurts College Athletes

Ryan Boatright was in trouble with the National Collegiate Athletic Association even before he played his first game as a freshman point guard for the University of Connecticut Huskies.

Boatright had arrived at UConn in the fall of 2011 from Aurora, Ill., a town of 200,000 an hour west of Chicago, with a per capita income that ranks it 261st among Illinois cities. His mother, Tanesha Boatright, was a single mom struggling to raise four children; her job as a customer service representative for a health care company, earned her a paycheck that was not much better than minimum wage. Her father had been a well-known local track coach, and she’d run track herself in high school, before she got pregnant with Ryan when she was 17. It was obvious early on that her son was also athletically gifted; despite his lack of size–he never grew taller than 5 foot 10–basketball was his game, and both he and his mother came to see the sport as his ticket to a better life, not just for himself but for his family. When he was 13, he attended a basketball camp run by Tim Floyd, then the basketball coach at the University of Southern California. Floyd became so enamored with Boatright that he offered him a scholarship on the spot. (Floyd resigned a few years later, after being tarred by a recruiting scandal.) At East Aurora High School, Boatright started as a freshman; three years later, as the team’s senior point guard, he averaged over 30 points a game and was named Illinois’s co–Mr. Basketball.

Image courtesy of Portfolio/Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Like many top high school athletes, Boatright also played for a local Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team. His coach, Reggie Rose, the brother of Chicago Bulls star Derrick Rose, was a long-standing friend of his mother’s, and over time he became a father figure to Boatright. During a particularly stressful period in the Boatright household, Rose got Ryan out of Aurora, taking him to California, where he spent several days working out with other good players—another thing the best high school players commonly do. When Tanesha bought a used car, a 2008 Chevrolet Impala that she needed to get to her job, Rose helped her with some of the payments. And when Boatright went on his recruiting visits—he made four trips in all, including one to the UConn campus in Storrs, Conn.—Rose covered the cost of an additional plane ticket so that Tanesha could go too. Most people would view these as acts of generosity, a friend helping out a friend with fewer resources. But the NCAA, which had been tipped off about the money Rose gave Tanesha, saw them as potential—nay, likely—violations of its “amateurism” rules. That’s why Boatright was in trouble.

Since the early 1950s, the NCAA has served as the powerful overlord of college sports, with one central tenet: that college athletes, whether gymnasts or quarterbacks, must be unpaid amateurs, for whom sports is little more than a sideline to their academic pursuits. As the NCAA puts it in its bylaws, “Student participation in intercollegiate athletics is an avocation, and student-athletes should be protected from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.”

The NCAA’s long-standing insistence that amateurism is the “core value” of college sports has always been more than a little hypocritical— as has the idea that the NCAA was somehow preventing (as opposed to enabling) their exploitation. Has there ever really been a time when the athletes in the so‑called revenue sports—football and men’s basketball— that are the focus of our book Indentured weren’t expected to put their sport first and their studies a distant second, while helping to bring glory and money to their school? Has there ever been a time when college athletes weren’t at some level exploited? Long before coaches made millions and the NCAA turned its annual basketball championship into the financial windfall known as March Madness, critics have complained about the pervasive commercialism of college athletics.

But with the NCAA now generating over $900 million in annual revenue; with athletic conferences owning their own lucrative all-sports cable networks; with coaches making $5 million (Jim Harbaugh, Michigan football) or $7 million (Nick Saban, Alabama football) or even $10 million (Mike Krzyzewski, Duke basketball); and with ESPN paying $7.3 billion over 12 years for the rights to the new college football playoff, the idea that the players who make all this possible should not much more than a scholarship isn’t just hypocritical. It’s offensive. An economist named Dan Rascher, who is a character in Indentured, estimates that college sports in its totality generates some $13 billion, which, incredibly, is more than the most lucrative professional sports league in America, the National Football League.

Before we go any further, a few facts: More than 460,000 NCAA athletes participate in 24 sports across its three divisions. Supporters of the status quo like to point out that the system as currently constructed maximizes opportunities for the largest number of athletes—think of all the scholarships for tennis players and swimmers. Indentured is focused on the 15,000 athletes playing top-level football and nearly 5,500 in Division I men’s basketball, because they produce the revenue that pays for everything from those expensive football coaches’ salaries to track and field scholarships. Indeed, most schools’ athletic department budgets remain separate from central administration. But while the college sports establishment squeezes every last dollar out of their marquee athletes—weekday night games, schools jumping from conference to conference, and a rash of corporate sponsors—they must remain amateurs, while a little more than 5% of them go on to careers in the NBA or NFL.

The NCAA has consistently refused to acknowledge this hypocrisy; instead, it has held tightly to the centrality of amateurism, even as it has encouraged the commercialization of college sports in every other way imaginable. And over the years, it has enforced its amateurism rules with a Javert-like zealotry. Until very recently, athletes could receive nothing for playing their sports beyond their athletic scholarship, plus a Pell Grant if they were poor enough to qualify. (As this book details, the NCAA has recently allowed schools to add a stipend to cover the “full cost of attendance” beyond the scholarship itself.) Anything else these athletes receive that the NCAA deems to be the result of their skill or fame, no matter how inconsequential, is considered a violation of its rules and is therefore punishable.

The NCAA eventually allowed Boatright to play for UConn–but only after it made his mother account for the $8,000 in gifts from Rose, and Boatright had agreed to repay $4,500 in benefits. He missed nine games of the 2012 season.

This article is excerpted from INDENTURED: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss. Reprinted with permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2016 by Joe Nocera and Ben Strauss.

A Heisman win comes with no financial reward, but it can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the schools — in extra donations, ticket sales, licensing fees, sponsorship deals and more. As for the players? There is no such bonanza guaranteed, according to ESPN.

College football has long been big business. The 65 schools that comprise the top five conferences pulled in $3.17 billion in revenue in 2014 alone, according to a Fortune analysis of Department of Education data. That’s an average of $48.8 million per institution.

To make those revenue numbers, these big schools pay their head coaches well, making them the biggest individual winners of all. Here are the salaries of the ten highest paid head football coaches, using data compiled by USA Today. They are all the top paid public employees in their states except for Kevin Sumlin, head coach at Texas A&M University, and that’s only because Charlie Strong at the University of Texas makes more. Also listed is the average pay for the nine full-time assistant coaches for each team.

Nike might have to fight to hold on to U. of Texas athletic apparel contract

The University of Texas has one of the biggest college athletics programs in the country and its teams sport some of the most recognizable uniforms of any NCAA team. And, that’s why athletic apparel companies could soon be clawing past one another to win the right to affix their logos to those uniforms.

Nike NKE currently pays Texas for the right to display the company’s signature swoosh on the Longhorns’ uniforms, shoes and merchandise, but the athletic apparel giant reportedly will not renew its current contract (an extension of a seven-year, $17 million pact between Nike and the school from 2000) before a deadline this week, according to Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources.

As Bloomberg notes, rival apparel companies like Under Armour UA and Adidas ADS are likely to enter the bidding for the lucrative Texas contract — which could be worth more than $15 million per year — once it comes up for grabs, which means Nike will face some fierce competition if it wants to keep doing business with the school.

Earlier this summer, Nike reached a deal worth $169 million over 11 years to replace Adidas as the official sponsor for the University of Michigan’s sports teams. That deal followed a coup for Under Armour (which is big supporter of CEO Kevin Plank’s alma mater, the University of Maryland) when the company last year reached an apparel agreement with the University of Notre Dame — a deal that school said was the largest ever in college sports at the time.

Athletic apparel contracts are also getting bigger and bigger in the professional realm, as Nike can attest, having recently agreed to spend a reported $1 billion on a deal to outfit the NBA and WNBA, supplanting Adidas from that role starting in 2017.

As Bloomberg notes, the University of Texas outpaces all other collegiate athletic programs in the U.S. in terms of revenue, topping $160 million annually in recent years.

Less than half of women’s college sports teams are coached by women

Female coaches were all over the headlines this summer. First was Becky Hammon of the San Antonio Spurs, who became the NBA’s first female head coach at Summer League—and brought home the League trophy. Then came the news that Nancy Lieberman will join Hammon in the NBA as assistant coach of the Sacramento Kings. And in football, Jen Welter was the first-ever woman to land a coaching internship in the NFL, though her gig has since ended.

But with school starting back up, some sports fans are now turning their attention back to college athletics. And on campus, the picture for female coaches is decidedly less rosy.

The percentage of women coached by women has declined to an all-time low, even while Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal dollars, has dramatically increased participation numbers for female athletes.

In 1972, when Title IX was signed into law, 90% of women’s college teams were coached by women, according to research from the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. By 2012, that number had fallen to 42.9%. Meanwhile, the percentage of women coaching men’s teams at the collegiate level has remained almost exactly the same—around 2%—for the last 40 years, according to Tucker.

The shift is one of the unintended consequences of Title IX, according to researchers. With more money flowing into women’s sports, some coaching positions at women’s teams have become more lucrative, and so drawn more interest from male coaches. These jobs are also seen as valuable “layovers” for male collegiate coaches who are waiting for chance to “move up” into the men’s leagues.

“It’s pretty dire,” says Nicole M. LaVoi, Tucker’s associate director. “It’s a complex answer to why that is, but I think at the heart of it is power.”

In recent years, billions of dollars have funneled into college athletics coffers, either through lucrative television contracts, taxpayer dollars, booster support or ticket sales. Some of that money has gone into coaching salaries—indeed, a few college football coaches are now the highest-paid public employees in their respective states.Yet none of those top earners are women.

The highest paid male coach in college sports, Nick Saban of Alabama, earned around $7 million. The highest paid female coaches in college sports, such as Sherri Coale of Oklahoma, make about one seventh of that, around $1 million.

And, while the salaries for women’s coaches have improved, they continue to lag those of men’s coaches. In 2011, head coaches for all women’s teams in the BIG 10 conference made less than a third of what the men’s coaches pulled in, $149,000 compared with $490,000, according to research from Tucker. The average salary for a college football head coach in the conference was $2.27 million and men’s basketball coaches made $1.9 million on average, compared with $365,000 for the head coaches of BIG 10 women’s basketball teams.

“Post Title IX, men have enjoyed the opportunity to coach women,” LaVoi said, noting that Title IX opened up a plethora of jobs coaching women. “But the women’s coaching opportunities have not opened up the same way. You could argue that Title IX has benefitted male coaches more than women coaches.”

The case for high coaching salaries, particularly in men’s football and basketball, is often that a star leader brings in more enthusiasm—and revenue. However, in 1997, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published guidance that said that schools must look beyond that, the thinking being that if women’s coaches are not being supported equally, it becomes difficult for them to generate the same amount of money as their male counterparts. (Individual schools are required by the Department of Education to publicly disclose data related to the equity in athletics.)

Tucker analyzed 76 schools, assigning letter grades based on the percentage of women serving as the head coaches of women’s teams. An underwhelming nine schools (11.8%) received an A or B grade—while half received Ds or Fs. Only three institutions (Cincinnati, Texas and the University of Miami) received As for being above average when compared to peer institutions and at least one school, Oklahoma State, didn’t have any women head coaches for women’s teams.

The lack of women in coaching and leadership roles in collegiate sports is “devastating,”says Deborah Slaner Larkin, chief executive of the Women’s Sports Foundation. Not only does it lower the potential career ceiling for women in athletics, but it also means fewer female role models.

Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel and director of equal opportunities in athletics for the National Women’s Law Center, says she regularly hears from female collegiate coaches concerned about retaliation when discussing pay or promotion, although many may not pursue legal claims. Much of what constitutes a gender-based disparity depends on a particular case, she said.

Ironically, female coaches who push hard for what they deserve are sometimes punished for being too aggressive, says Chaudhry: “If they’re really tough, they’re fired.” On the other hand, those qualities are often seen as assets for male coaches, she says.

“If you look at the numbers and see big disparities, that’s a red flag,” Chaudhry said of the salary gaps between male and female coaches. “Clearly coaching makes all the difference.”

Nike just nabbed one of Adidas’ biggest contracts

The Beaverton, Ore.-based sportswear-maker has won the right to equip the University of Michigan’s sports teams with athletic gear until 2027. The agreement also stipulates that NikeNKE has an option to extend the contract until 2031.

The partnership, which commences in August of next year, will stock the “M Den,” the school’s official athletics retailer, with Nike-made apparel. The school says it hopes the deal will also bring student internship opportunities at the company as well as design and technology collaborations.

​”After careful consideration, the right partner for the University of Michigan was Nike” interim athletic director Jim Hackett (no known relation to the author) said in a statement. “This decision, this partnership is about more than Michigan athletics; at the core, it is about our University community and it is about two great names reuniting for an opportunity that speaks to more than uniforms and apparel. Nike is a recognized leader in its field when it comes to product innovation and we look forward to future collaboration.”

Adidas North America president Mark King told WSJ that the loss is unfortunate, but that the company would rebound. “Obviously we’re very disappointed that Michigan didn’t choose us,” he said, “but we can probably sign four or five really wonderful schools as we go forward.”

College basketball coaches and their slam dunk salaries

March Madness: Americans are crazy for it, spending a collective 664 million hours last year alone in front of screens, watching college athletes race up and down courts while dribbling, shooting, fouling, and waiting during commercials. And it’s expensive. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimated that companies would lose upwards of $1.9 billion in wages as people fill out their brackets and track results.

Even as managers try to control the event in their offices, the NCAA wants to keep the series from intersecting with business in a different way. The body has asked appellate judges to keep players from making money off licensing their names and likenesses. The officials want to keep the amateur standing of the games. At least for student players.

Coaches are a different matter. Far from the amateur ranks, experienced and winning coaches get CEO-sized compensation from big public and private universities. More than an ego boost, basketball — the men’s programs, in particular — can bring in tens of millions of dollars and leave a profit sweeter than any last-second three-point shot. Every year, USA Today and the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center work together to assemble and calculate the men’s basketball coaches’ salaries.

Fortune took the most recent numbers and combined them with results from university financial or government regulatory filings to show how big the salaries, and the payback (when available), are at the five schools paying the most to their coaches. We also provided the pay for the associated university president or chancellor for comparative context.

Coach: Rick Pitino
Total pay: $5,758,338
Maximum bonus: $775,000
University president pay: James Ramsey, $1.2 million
Basketball program revenue: $16.7 million
Basketball program expenses: $12.1 million
Gross profit: $4.6 million

University of Kentucky

Coach: John Calipari
Total pay: $5,511,381
Maximum bonus: $850,000
University president pay: Eli Capilouto, $685,500
Basketball program revenue: $22.8 million
Basketball program expenses: $15.1 million
Gross profit: $7.7 million

In major blow to NCAA, judge rules that colleges can pay athletes

A federal judge struck a major blow against the NCAA’s ban on paying college athletes by ruling that they are entitled to a limited share of licensing revenue.

The landmark decision on Friday that student basketball and football players can earn money from the use of their likenesses could dramatically upend college athletics, which has, until now, been based on the idea of amateurism.

U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken ruled in an antitrust case that NCAA rules prohibiting payments “unreasonably restrain trade.” She said that schools should be free to give athletes “a limited share of the revenues generated from the use of their names, images, and likenesses in addition to a full grant-in-aid.”

The case, brought in 2009 by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon, unfolded over three weeks in Oakland, Calif. The plaintiffs argued that the NCAA was a cartel whose rules made schools wealthy while athletes received little to none of the profits from licensing of their names and images.

NCAA attorneys, meanwhile, defended the system by saying it’s necessary to ensure a competitive balance among schools and that profits from money-making sports was used to fund programs without lucrative television deals. Donald Remy, the organization’s chief legal officer, responded to the judge’s ruling with disappointment.

“We disagree with the Court’s decision that NCAA rules violate antitrust laws,” he said in a statement. “We note that the Court’s decision sets limits on compensation, but are reviewing the full decision and will provide further comment later. As evidenced by yesterday’s Board of Directors action, the NCAA is committed to fully supporting student-athletes.”

There was no mention of whether the NCAA would appeal the decision.

The judge’s ruling puts an injunction on the NCAA enforcing rules that block major schools and conferences from creating trusts funded with a limited share of licensing revenue for football and basketball recruits. Those funds could be payable when the athletes leave school or after their eligibility expires.

In her ruling, the judge said the NCAA could cap the amount of money that goes to the trust. But that cap must be no less than $5,000 for every year an athlete competes, she said. In addition, athletes would still be eligible for athletic scholarships covering tuition and housing.

3d Lacrosse: Thinking Inside the Box

FORTUNE—This weekend the University of Denver will be battling in the quarterfinal round of the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Tournament. Back when Jamie Munro took over the men’s lacrosse team there in 1998, he didn’t have much to work with. The wan program (Division II, until Munro arrived) resembled more of a club team than a college one. It barely had any money, and even less competitive edge, it appeared.

What the former Yale assistant coach did have, though, was an utter belief in Canadians, and their style of indoor play called box lacrosse: “The rules of that game and the environment of that game create a completely different player,” says Munro, who first learned of it as a 25-year-old indoor pro for the Boston Blazers in the 1990s (when the team belonged the Major Indoor Lacrosse League).

Munro’s box-infused strategy — both in how he coached, and in who he recruited (a lot of Canadians) — helped him transform the Pioneers into a perennial Top 20 team in Division I, with two Top 12 finishes to its credit. By the time Munro retired from college coaching in 2009, he had also helped raise $10 million for scholarships, facilities, and other costs.

Yet even those victories are starting to look like a warm-up compared to Munro’s next act as CEO of 3d Lacrosse, a $7 million-a-year training business aimed squarely at one of the fastest-growing youth sports in the U.S. Founded in 2009, 3d’s mix of club teams, workshops, events and other services draw some 25,000 girls and boys per year. Among the current class of high school sophomores, four of the top 25 male lacrosse athletes play on 3d teams.

“We’re trying to scale a player development model across the country,” Munro says, “and it is changing the way people look at the game.”

Indeed, Denver-based 3d doesn’t just aspire for regional traction, but rather national dominance. Munro and president and chief operating officer Greg Waldbaum have established operations in nine hubs in six states, including Massachusetts, California, and Oregon.

“The power center has, I think, been broken up and you don’t have to be based in the East to be part of the game,” says Waldbaum, who is planning to expand 3d into Texas and the Midwest next.

The customers who sign up with 3d — whether a client like Connecticut’s Greenwich Youth Lacrosse, purchasing training workshops for its own coaches, or families in search of a club teams for the kids — are buying an education in Munro’s methodology, branded the “box/field hybrid development system.” Think of it as the turbo-charge of indoor Canadian play turned out into the sport’s great outdoor expanse. Players practice in much tighter confines, and with smaller goal nets, than they normally would.

The foreign set-up forces players to sharpen their offensive skills (more pick-and-rolls, less simply outrunning your opponent) and to take smarter shots on the goal. Box “teaches a level of IQ that field lacrosse players just don’t get,” Munro says.

Waldbaum witnessed the difference up close, back in 2009. A self-described serial entrepreneur, Waldbaum had started a successful chain of animal hospitals in Colorado, which he sold to Nasdaq-traded Veterinary Centers of America in 2010. But when it came to coaching his then-fifth grader’s lacrosse team, he’d hit a wall. “I was running into my maximum skillset of coaching lacrosse,” he recalls.

On a lark, Waldbaum called up Munro to see if he could work with the kids, now that he’d hung up his Division-1 hat. The training went so well that six months later the pair put their heads together about how they might expand Munro’s services. Waldbaum was also impressed by another Munro creation: During his college coaching tenure, he, along with his wife Sara (now 3d’s director of events) launched an annual tournament and recruiting event called the Denver Shootout.

Last June, the event brought 4,000 players to Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. This past March, another popular 3d event— spring break training — drew 1,500 kids down to Florida. And come summer, the company will field 90 club teams across the country.

Waldbaum says that, fundamentally, what the company offers is a platform “for kids to get better.” Equally important, though, is the goal of creating a customer-oriented experience for parents and young players. “There are very few providers of really organized programming,” he says. 3d is building its reputation as much on rigorous training, as attention to details like good-looking uniforms and smooth travel logistics.

Talent-wise, college recruiters obviously like what they see. A joint venture called 3d Blue Chip hosts 2,100 of the top 8th, 9th, and 10th graders (and some juniors) to train and try-out for scouts each winter. According to data compiled by Inside Lacrosse, of the 44 high school freshman boys already committed to college, 50 percent have participated in 3d Blue Chip.

As the company continues to expand its talent pool, Munro believes 3d can become an increasingly valuable asset to college coaches. “Our goals are to be one of the most credible ratings and rankings organizations that there is,” he says.

Offering equal pay to college athletes won’t work

A baton has been passed in the lawsuit that experts are calling the most significant in the history of college sports.

Former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon first filed his antitrust suit in July 2009, arguing that he and other college athletes are owed restitution when their image is used for corporate gain—video games, jerseys, advertisements, game broadcasts—and that the NCAA has joined forces with companies to ensure that players do not get it.

On Nov. 8, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken certified the suit as a class action, but only partially: Wilken approved the potential for lawsuits against NCAA rules that bar athletes from engaging in group licensing deals, but she denied certification of suits based on athletes being paid for past use of their image in video games and TV broadcasts. That effectively shifts the focus from former college athletes to current and future ones; current athletes can sue the NCAA, but alums cannot.

The question at the heart of this lawsuit remains the same, however, and is a controversial one indeed: Is the NCAA’s “amateurism” label, which is what has allowed it to mandate that college athletes cannot be paid, unfair?

The courts may ultimately decide that the answer is yes. But O’Bannon’s legal team has a difficult road ahead facing the NCAA, an organization capable of using its considerable resources to stall litigation. The plaintiffs won a victory in September when video game maker Electronic Arts EA and the Collegiate Licensing Company agreed to settle; the two companies will dole out a reported $40 million to some 125,000 players (that number may grow) and EA will not put out a college football game in 2014.

But the argument against EA and the CLC was the easier one to win, and the victories of this lawsuit may stop there. There will be major pressure on the NCAA now to settle before the June trial, but don’t expect it. “This is a fight to the death,” suggested attorney Alan Milstein at a University of New Hampshire Law School panel on the lawsuit this month. “The NCAA conceding its belief that athletes should not get paid would be like the Catholic Church giving up its idea of Immaculate Conception.”

The main issue now becomes TV money and whether the NCAA ought to dole out some of it to the players. But a key question is exactly how players, if they were to get paid, would share the money. O’Bannon’s side proposes that all players share money equally, regardless of their stardom. That argument satisfied Judge Wilken, who acknowledged that some players are more recognizable than others, but reasoned that equal sharing would “not necessarily… create a conflict of interest.”

Sorry, but that doesn’t make sense. The reason compensation for college athletes is a hot issue isn’t just because of TV rights for entire teams. It’s because companies are making money off certain individual mega-stars.

Think of Heisman Trophy-winning Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel. Or, as he is known to many college football fans, “Johnny Football.” In the offseason, the NCAA investigated claims that Manziel had been paid money by memorabilia dealers to autograph footballs. It found no proof that he had, and Manziel was only suspended for half of one game for an “inadvertent” violation of a rule governing autograph signing. If the NCAA had concluded that Manziel was paid, he could have faced a much longer suspension. But many feel that he should be allowed to make money from his name. He is unquestionably one of college football’s biggest individual stars. As UNH athletic director Marty Scarano told Fortune before the O’Bannon panel, Manziel “would command big money. His blockers, not so much.”

The idea that other players on the A&M squad are worth the same as Manziel is nice in theory, but in practice it just isn’t true. Does it seem fair that Manziel and his teammates would be paid the same? Would other star players be okay with that arrangement down the road? How should the rules deal with a star player who has the potential to earn real money right now, while still in college?

“Let him go make it,” says Joe Rosen, an attorney, baseball agent and sports law professor in Boston. “That’s the best way, in my opinion, to deal with the disparity between players—just allow them to handle their own deals. A guy like [Alabama quarterback] AJ McCarron is a good example—we don’t know if he’ll ever play a down in the NFL. But he certainly is a superstar for Alabama, and so he can make a lot of money off his likeness right now, and he might not have the opportunity to do that later on.”

Manziel, incidentally, has taken steps to protect his future earning power. His family has applied to trademark the “Johnny Football” nickname, and earlier this year filed a lawsuit, since settled, against a t-shirt maker using the phrase.

To be sure, O’Bannon’s argument for equal pay was the right one legally—it was the only way the group would be certified as a class. But it will disproportionately benefit lesser athletes. If O’Bannon wins, college athletes will be able to enter into group licensing deals. (And sports law professor Michael McCann, writing for SI.com, suggests the possibility of a trade association.) Judge Wilken is assuming all players would just accept being part of the class. But why should they? The next Johnny Manziel, wherever he is, would be wise to opt out and challenge the new system.

In almost all cases, one or two sports dominate the merchandise, ticket sales, and publicity at any college—usually football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball. In those situations, it’s a stretch to say that the guys on the rugby team are owed the same money as the football players. As Scarano said on the UNH Law panel, “99.9% of the student athletes in Division I are anonymous people that love their institutions and feel they’re getting a very good deal.”

Indeed, a full or partial scholarship—which O’Bannon argues is inadequate—is more than enough for most. It’s four years of education, and it has great value. The non-stars don’t necessarily merit more money, whether within a class or not. It is the players who get made into stars on ESPN, featured on merchandise, and used in ads for big games that deserve more.

Many, many people—from fans to players to parents and even administrators who cannot say so publicly—feel that the NCAA has exploited athletes for years and ought to be paying them money. And there will be a lawsuit, or a series of lawsuits, that brings the NCAA to its knees. But it may not be this one. This lawsuit doesn’t do enough for the individual “amateur” stars we’re all thinking of when we discuss these issues.